Well, I’ve been holding back on excerpts of what I’ve written recently because too many of them would be spoilery. But that doesn’t mean I have to be totally excerpt-free, sorry. 
Here for your hopefully voracious enjoyment are the opening of the chapter and a Cerlota vignette from Irduin, formatted for semi-easy reading as a forum post. (For the Cerlota one in particular, it may be hard to follow the dialogue tree logic in the end without proper indents, but I think you’ll get the idea.)
Feedback always welcome!
NB on the chapter numbers and names – my current thoughts on the revised schema have got as far as:
Game II: Stormwright
Ch 5: Chaos and Telos
Ch 6: Stormfighters and Stormbringers [the Sojourn chapter]
Ch 7: Dance of Shadows [the Riverlands and Irduin part one]
Ch 8: The Oak and the Blackbird [Irduin part two]
but I’m not totally wedded to the new chapter names yet.
Chapter Intro
Chapter Seven
Dance of Shadows
Even when you reach the sparse rank of poplars atop the rise, there’s no respite from the west wind’s parching heat. You pause in the shade with your eyes closed, ignoring the noise as best you can, and try to imagine yourself back in the Whendward forest country. There, even in summer the north-facing slopes emanated a damp, refreshing chill, and the springs were cool. Your nostrils flare. Is that a hint of the Brecklands you catch on the hot wind? Wild grass, salt fennel, and sheep, borne in from so many miles away?
When you open your eyes, all those fragile memories and scents are shattered by the teeming, obtrusive strangeness of the Serdre riverlands. Nothing within eyeshot is wild—nothing unshaped by human labor or Theurgy. The only trees are in gardens and groves, or planted (like the row behind you) along roadsides and field boundaries. Every inch of land that can be is cultivated; the vast, flat swathes of cropland and canals are interrupted only by clusters of shacks every few hundred yards, built on stilts above mud flats, or on rocky ridges, or on land otherwise unsuited to the plow.
At the heart of it all, a greenish-brown expanse of water nearly a half-mile wide hurls the sunlight back at you. The Serdre’s not quite as yawningly vast here as when you first met it near Vaulens, but it could still swallow all of Rim Square like a millstone dropped into a well. Your hometown’s populace could even more easily vanish into the throng of sculls, ferryboats, and rafts that ply the river out to both horizons.
And ${oath}, all around you there are people everywhere, not singly but in crowds—trawling nets along the riverside, chopping down ratooned cane in the fields, hauling carts along the great stone roads on both banks, selling tiny wares from tiny stalls to passersby. The only places where anyone could hope for a moment alone are the thin-walled, flimsy houses, and given the steady flow of visitors in and out of their canvas doors, you’re not sure you could count those.
You’d always heard from @{aristo visiting nobles|newly arrived helots} that the rest of the Hegemony held millions upon millions of people, but somehow you’d got the idea that most of them lived in great cities. You’d assumed the farm country in between would look something like the Outer Rim…like anything you’d recognize.
The relief of no longer having Xaos-storms anywhere on the horizon will, you think, be with you for the rest of your life. But you weren’t ready for the Southriding of Shayard to feel so utterly alien.
*choice
#I’d thought I was coming home…but this loathsome place is no home to me.
As much as you’ve tried to adapt, there’s one thing above all others that you find unbearable:
*goto unbearable [subchoice block just below]
#It dizzies me, but I’m slowly getting used to it.
*set srfeel 4
When it first truly sunk in that you wouldn’t escape the constant babble of strangers’ voices from the moment you woke up until hours after dark, it made you want to crawl out of your skin. Now, it seems halfway normal, as does encountering a new hamlet every thousand yards or so.
*goto drap
#It’s intoxicating. I couldn’t have imagined a world this grand and full.
*set srfeel 5
The fact that it’s so different from your home just makes it more fascinating. How do people ever get used to this constant buzz of conversation, in a landscape where everything has been claimed and reshaped for human use? A decade of staring and listening probably wouldn’t be enough for you to take it all in.
*goto drap
*label unbearable
*choice
#I hate the lack of anything wild or free.
No real forests, no wilderness hills, no empty plains. A host of dogs, rats, and crows living off human scraps, but no deer or wild sheep, let alone wolves. The roads are straight, broad, and stone-cobbled, rather than the winding tracks of the Outer Rim. Even if you hadn’t just come from Xaos, you’d have been repelled by such a thoroughly ordered, thoroughly inhabited landscape.
*goto drap
#I can’t stand the crowds. $!{oath}, so many people.
*set srfeel 2
Even out here in what the folk of the Southriding call “open countryside,” the constant babble of hundreds of strangers’ voices is inescapable until many hours after dark. It had never occurred to you that it was possible to be in a place where you literally couldn’t go five minutes without smelling another person—or that you’d find it so maddening.
*goto drap
#The heat down here is going to kill me.
*set srfeel 3
You’d not realized how much being close to the sea had gentled the climes around Sojourn. With every week of moving inland, you’ve found the winds more torrid, the nights more sweltering. The harshest summers you’d ever known in the hills of the Outer Rim, hundreds of leagues north and west of here, were cool compared to this. And you’re not even properly on the cusp of summer yet—it’s still two months to Langday.
*goto drap
*label drap
With @{((srfeel = 1) or (srfeel = 3)) the|these} unimaginably large throngs of people come horrors and threats on a similar scale.
*choice
#So many Harrowers, looming over the town squares and rolling past you down the road.
Any town with at least a thousand helots in its hinterland—and there’s an unbelievable number of towns that size in the riverlands!—will have a blood harvesting machine built atop a broad plinth in its agora.
*if harrower = 0
These towns see a steady trickle of sacrifice throughout the year, making fuller use of the helots who in a place like Rim Square would have died of illness or untimely punishment between Theurgic visits.
When there’s no Harrowing, the harvesters are kept behind locked steel panels, not just covered with oilcloth as in the Outer Rim. You’d never be able to @{(harrower = 2) crawl|see} into one here like you @{(harrower = 2) did in Attenyeard|could in some of the towns back home}—never truly see the obscene thicket of hooks, blades, and pipes in the machine’s innards unless you were being fed into it.
As in Rim Square, the Southriding’s more remote plantations and villages are periodically visited by smaller machines on ox-carts. Every few days, one of those will creak grimly past you, smelling of ironmongery and the butcher’s block. So far, you’ve managed to avoid being drawn into the audience for any actual ceremonies; you’ve ducked into a wineroom or changed course whenever you’ve spotted signs of the local helotry being summoned or heard the Victory Liturgy faintly carried down the wind. But several times, you’ve been close enough to hear the screams.
*fake_choice
#Somehow they’re more horrible now that I have a clearer idea of what’s happening.
Ever since Cerlota explained the secrets of Theurgy to you, @{aristo your mind has been haunted by an appallingly vivid image of the splitting of victims’ skulls. What you’d always been told was a necessary, darkly holy sacrifice of blood is|it’s revived your horror at the cracked and gaping skulls of Harrowed helots. You’d always been told it was to draw out every drop of blood, that Harrowing. Now you know it’s} a mere pretense, under which the presiding Theurges knowingly harvest the living brains of the helotry. The idea makes your gorge rise and your flesh creep.
#I’m growing numb to them.
@{helot That happens to everyone sooner or later. How else could you live with the reality that one day, it’ll be you shrieking out your last agonizing seconds in the machine?|You’d witnessed enough Harrowings from a young age that the agony of the dying is by now bleakly familiar to you.} Since the rebellion began, you’ve certainly seen enough death and suffering to rob it of all its novelty, and much of its horror.
#I listen with quiet fury to each one, silently promising: One day we’ll feed your killers to the machine. One day.
@{(cerlota < 7) Listening to the Harrowed shriek away their last, lingering seconds, you close your eyes and hope that your rebellion somehow gave them hope that one day they’d be avenged. Spilling out the Theurges’ blood by running the mages|If you ever have magi as part of your rebellion, they’ll need to get their blood somewhere; why not from the criminals who sacrificed so many innocents to fuel their powers? Putting them} through their own machines will be fitting punishment for their atrocities.
#All I care about is not ending up inside a Harrower myself.
You can’t let yourself be pulled into feeling too much else, anything that might show on your face and betray you to an informer. You’re a stranger in this part of Shayard, and all your effort needs to be going toward returning safely to the Rim. Once you’ve found sanctuary with @{(wonfight < 6) whatever’s survived of|} your rebellion, you can start thinking about breaking Harrowers again.
*goto hidrap
#So many Alastors, interrogating folk on the roadside and seizing anyone they think suspicious.
*set southreat 2
You pass the enforcers of the Hegemony multiple times daily, truculently sweaty in their scale armor, checking people for weapons and wagons for contraband. With hundreds, even thousands of travelers on the river road, they can only inspect a fraction and haven’t yet landed on you. But you’ve been close enough to witness the Alastors claiming their “tolls” from scores of passersby, and whisking at least a dozen purported criminals away to a cell and the Harrower.
The Alastors appear in particularly large numbers near helot settlements. Down here in the Southriding, they’re not just quartered on the grounds of nobles’ homes or in little garrison stockades, like you’re used to. Rather, near the bigger plantations or towns with lots of grand farms around, there are whole villages of Alastors (with their spouses, concubines, and children), in place to quell the first hint of a helot uprising. @{aristo You’re beginning to understand what your father and his fellow nobles had in mind when they complained about how relatively few enforcers there were to keep the helots of Rim Square in line|What must it be like for the helotry here, you think queasily, with a host like that always hanging about them, close as the overseers on our old estate?}.
*goto hidrap
#So many spies and informants, eyeing passersby and eavesdropping on conversations.
*set southreat 3
In the far smaller towns and villages of the Rim, if anyone passed life-threatening tales about a neighbor to the Hegemonic authorities, the informant would likely be found out and ostracized for the rest of their lives. But from some of the muttered conversations you’ve overheard, you gather that most Souther-folk just have too many neighbors for anyone to be sure who’s taken the Alastors’ coin.
And the constant flow of strangers through the river towns multiplies the risk of betrayal a hundredfold. Whenever you see a squad of enforcers running along the road, truculently sweaty in their scale armor, they’re almost always being guided by a plainly-dressed civilian. In plenty of the winerooms you’ve visited, you’ve noticed men and women hovering on the edge of first one conversation, then another, like hawks circling hillside to hillside. They’re probably not Kryptast infiltrators—just ordinary spies, hoping to earn some advantage by reporting sedition, or theft, or a suspicious wanderer and possible fugitive.
*goto hidrap
*label hidrap
You linger for a minute in the shade of the poplars, reluctant to step back into the heat and the train of people trudging past. We used to tell @{(nothief = 2) anyone leaving the wilderness|our raiding parties} to be like shadows, you think blearily, easy to overlook, blending into the forests, leaving no trace. But here in the flatlands under the baking southern sun, every shadow is sharp and conspicuous. No real shelter, down here. Nowhere to hide. Only the crowds…and they’re as likely to keep you from seeing your enemies coming as the other way round.
A convoy of larger boats appears from the north, sending smaller vessels scattering toward the riverbanks as quick as they can paddle. As they come closer, you can see that each sixty-foot barge is mounded high with wheat, barley, metal ingots, and other cargo under canvas. The fifth and rearmost has a great wheel at its stern, churning the water white; an implacable-looking Theurge stands under an awning next to it, hand outstretched. Virtually every daylit hour sees one or two of these mage-driven convoys coming downriver, bearing the wealth of the Rim and upper Southriding toward Grand Shayard.
“Don’t see many of those where you’re from, good${woman}?” inquires a sardonic voice at your shoulder.
You force a @{(srfeel < 4) chuckle, hoping your distaste for the Southriding wasn’t too visible on your face,|chuckle} and cast your gaze further along the north road before turning to the speaker. “Just scanning for a place a ${woman} can get something to drink.”
The scraggly-bearded stranger wears a simple linen tunic and leggings, and his carry-sack is unadorned, but the dagger on his belt has an onyx in its finely wrought hilt. “From the Rim, eh, my ${girl}?” A shrewd gleam enters his eyes when he hears your accent. “And homeward bound? What’s brought you south, then?”